Free Hosting for Commercial Use: What the Terms Actually Say

Free hosting for commercial use is rarer in writing than most makers assume. Of the 14 vendors in the ZeroRaised free tiers dataset, checked 22 Oct 2026, only Vercel says plainly that its Hobby plan is for "personal or non-commercial use" (Vercel terms). Turso's terms say "non-commercial use" but do not name the free plan (Turso terms), and for the other 12 a commercial-use rule is not published. Vercel's terms update of 19 October 2026 left its Hobby sentence in place, so read the terms or ask the vendor before you charge on a free plan.

Disclosure: ZeroRaised publishes this guide and the free tiers dataset it draws on, and appears in the final section. Every limit, price and terms statement about a vendor below comes from that dataset or from the dated vendor announcement it links. The dataset was built only from each vendor's own pricing, docs and terms pages, checked 22 Oct 2026. Each vendor fact links to the vendor page it came from, and every one of those pages was fetched again on 22 Oct 2026. This is not legal advice. ZeroRaised has no affiliate deal with any company named here.

TL;DR#

Commercial-use rules for each free plan, from the vendor's own pages, checked 22 Oct 2026:

Not published does not mean allowed: the pages checked did not state a rule either way. If revenue will depend on a free plan, read that vendor's terms or ask the vendor, and keep the answer.

What changed: Vercel's Hobby and Pro terms update, 19 October 2026#

On 19 October 2026 (the changelog shows "19 Oct 2026"; its published timestamp is 18:39 UTC), Vercel posted Updates to Hobby and Pro Terms of Service. It opens: "We are updating the Terms of Service for Hobby and Pro customers, effective October 19, 2026." The post says the changes "clarify some existing Vercel practices" and expand terms on "managed accounts and credits". It also covers renewal, cancellation rights for eligible consumers in the UK and EU, and a new Service Terms page.

The changelog says nothing about commercial use. The Terms of Service page, fetched on 22 Oct 2026, shows "Last Updated October 19, 2026" and still contains the sentence the free tiers dataset recorded: "You shall only use the Services under a Hobby plan for your personal or non-commercial use." The rewrite changed a good deal around the edges and left the Hobby rule where it was.

A second dated change shows why the date you checked matters. On 9 October 2026 (shown as "October 9, 2026"; timestamp 15:00 UTC), Ryan Dahl announced Deno is joining Cloudflare. The post says "Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down", with "migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers." Deno Deploy is one of the 14 rows in the dataset, and its Free plan was still listed on its pricing page when checked on 22 Oct 2026. A free plan on a service that has announced its own end is a poor place to start charging customers, whatever its terms say.

Neither change is unusual. Free plans are set at each vendor's discretion; Vercel's terms say so in as many words: "We offer a free Hobby plan at our sole discretion." The rest of this guide takes each vendor's free plan as it stood on 22 Oct 2026.

Vercel Hobby: the one free plan that says no#

Vercel is the only vendor in the dataset whose pages answer the question directly, and it answers it four times. All four pages below were checked on 22 Oct 2026.

So the search suggestions "vercel hobby commercial use" and "can i use vercel hobby for commercial use" get one answer from Vercel's own pages: no, commercial usage belongs on Pro or Enterprise.

What the Hobby plan includes#

The Hobby docs describe the plan as "free and aimed at developers with personal projects, and small-scale applications" (Hobby docs). On the pricing page, Hobby ($0/mo.) includes Fluid Active CPU 4 hours / month, Fluid Provisioned Memory 360 GB-hrs / month, Function Invocations 1M / month, Fast Data Transfer 100 GB / month and Blob Storage Size 1 GB / month. There is no database in the plan table.

Two rules on top of the allowances matter if real users arrive:

• The caps are fixed. "If you have a free Hobby account, you are limited to the usage caps and cannot purchase additional usage" (Vercel pricing).
• Going over stops the feature for a while. The Hobby docs say that if you exceed your usage limits "you will have to wait until 30 days have passed before you can use the feature again."

Even setting the terms aside, a paid product should not be one traffic spike away from a feature that stays off for up to a month.

What counts as commercial#

The pages in the dataset do not define commercial use, and this guide will not invent a definition for Vercel. Some projects sit at the edges: a portfolio linking to paid consulting, a free tool with a sponsor slot, a client site. If you cannot say with confidence that yours is personal or non-commercial, treat it as commercial or ask Vercel. Its fair use guidelines already give the route for commercial usage: a Pro or Enterprise plan (Vercel fair use).

This guide covers free plans only, so it does not quote Pro prices. Check the pricing page for the current figure and put it in your costs from the first paid customer.

Turso: non-commercial wording that does not name the free plan#

Turso is the awkward case. Its Terms of Use, checked 22 Oct 2026, contain this sentence: "You will only use the Services for your own internal business, personal, non-commercial use, and not on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party".

The terms describe themselves as the rules for Turso's "website(s), products, services and applications", which they call the Services, so they cover everything Turso offers rather than one plan. The sentence says "non-commercial use", but nowhere ties that to the Free plan or separates it from paid plans. The terms page shows "Last updated March 2024".

So Turso's terms say "non-commercial use" but do not name the free plan. That is exactly as far as the published text goes. ZeroRaised does not read it as a yes or a no for a paid product on the free plan, and a forum thread's reading does not settle it either. If your revenue will run through Turso's free plan, ask Turso in writing what applies to you.

On the pricing page, checked 22 Oct 2026, the Free ($0/month) plan lists 100 databases, 5GB storage, 500 Million monthly rows read, 10 Million monthly rows written, Monthly Syncs 3GB and Point-In-Time Restore 1 day. The same page carries a banner reading "Turso is joining Supabase", and the dataset notes the plan may change: one more reason to get an answer in writing.

Free hosting for commercial use at the other 12 vendors: not published#

For the remaining vendors, the dataset's answer to whether you can charge customers on the free plan is two words: not published. That is easy to misread.

On 22 Oct 2026, each vendor's own terms of service, acceptable use and fair use pages were fetched and searched for a commercial-use rule. For these 12, none was found that applies to the free plan. In the dataset's words, not published "does not mean" no limit, allowed or not required. It means the vendor did not say, on the pages checked. Fly.io and PlanetScale read "n/a (no free tier)", because there is no free plan to have a rule about.

Search suggestions show people asking vendor by vendor: "netlify free tier commercial use", "cloudflare free tier commercial use", "supabase free tier commercial use". From each vendor's own pages on 22 Oct 2026, the answer is not published. Anything more confident is someone's reading, not the vendor's rule.

What vendors say their free plans are for#

Most vendors do say who the free plan is aimed at. These lines are not commercial-use rules and none is permission, but they show how the vendor thinks about the plan. All checked 22 Oct 2026.

Render's line is the strongest. The dataset does not record it as a commercial-use rule, but a vendor telling you not to use something for production is a clear signal about how far to depend on it. Deno's "personal use" and Neon's "development and prototyping" point the same way.

Why not published is not a yes#

Silence is not consent, for three reasons:

1. Terms change. Vercel's terms update took effect on 19 Oct 2026, and Deno announced the end of Deno Deploy on 9 Oct 2026. Silence today promises nothing about next quarter.
2. The search covered specific pages. The dataset names them for each vendor, such as Netlify's self-serve subscription agreement, acceptable use policy and terms of use. A rule elsewhere would not have been caught.
3. Limits still apply. A plan that pauses projects or sleeps after minutes is not built for paying users, whatever its terms say.

None of this is a judgement on these vendors' paid plans, which this guide does not cover. The safe move is to ask before your revenue depends on a free plan.

Free plan limits that bite once customers pay#

Terms are one question. The other is whether a free plan behaves well enough to charge for. These are the limits that turn into support emails, from each vendor's own pages, checked 22 Oct 2026.

Sleeping is fine for a demo and awkward for a customer: the first visitor after a quiet spell waits while the service wakes. Pauses are worse, because something has to wake the project. Supabase pauses Free projects "after 1 week of inactivity" (Supabase pricing), and MongoDB pauses Free clusters "after 30 days of inactivity where there are zero connections to the cluster" (MongoDB limits). A new product with a few trial users can go that quiet.

The harshest limits are account-wide. Netlify says "if one project exceeds its limits, all projects on your account will be paused" (Netlify pricing). Render says that if bandwidth runs out with no payment method on file, it "suspends all of your Free services for the remainder of the month" (Render free docs). A side project and a paid product on the same free account share that fate.

If a launch is what pushes you over, the traffic spikes guide covers what to check on paid dependencies beforehand. Free caps are harder, because they usually cannot be raised in the moment.

No free tier, trials and card rules#

Two vendors have no free tier for new accounts, one starts with a trial, and only a few say whether you need a card. A trial is not a free plan, and once a card is on file the line between free and paid gets thin. All checked 22 Oct 2026.

Fly.io's page is direct: "New organizations don’t have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance", and "After the trial ends, you’ll need to add a credit card to keep using billable resources" (Fly.io pricing). Organizations on plans discontinued in October 2024 keep their old allowances, which does not help a new product. PlanetScale has no free tier either; its lowest listed price is "Starting at $5/month" (PlanetScale pricing). Both rows stay in the dataset so that a search for a free tier finds the honest answer.

Railway's Free plan is measured in a single dollar of monthly credit that "does not roll over month to month" (Railway free trial docs). That is a plan for small apps, not for a product with paying users.

How to check a free plan before you charge anyone#

The dataset is a starting point, not a ruling on your project. Before a free plan carries anything that earns money, run through these steps. They take an evening, which is cheaper than moving hosts in a hurry.

1. Find every page that might hold the rule. That means the terms of service, any acceptable use and fair use pages, and the plan description on the pricing page. The free tiers dataset lists the pages searched for each vendor.
2. Search for the words that matter. Commercial, non-commercial, personal, business, production and third party. Turso's sentence, for example, mentions "internal business" and "third party" as well as "non-commercial use" (Turso terms), so a search for one word alone could miss the context.
3. Read the plan description as well as the terms. A line such as Render's "Do not use them for production applications" (Render free docs) is not a commercial-use rule, but it tells you how the vendor expects the plan to be used.
4. Ask the vendor in writing when the pages are silent. Describe what you are building and how you will charge for it, and ask whether the free plan applies. Keep the reply, with its date.
5. Save a dated copy of the terms you relied on. Vercel's Terms of Service now show "Last Updated October 19, 2026". The next update could be the one that matters to you.
6. Price in the paid plan from the start. The limits above make a paid plan likely once customers arrive anyway.

Put the paid plan in your numbers#

The real question behind free hosting for commercial use is often cost, not law: can the product pay for its own hosting? Put the paid plan's monthly price, and anything else you pay each month, into the monthly costs of the ramen profitability calculator. It works out how many paying customers cover those costs after payment fees, the MRR that takes, and how many new customers you need each month to replace churn.

If the number of customers looks high, the answer is usually price, not a cheaper host. How to price a SaaS product covers setting a price that covers costs like these. Startup credit programmes can also pay for a paid plan for a while; free startup perks without VC covers which ones a bootstrapped maker can get.

A quick decision table#

This guide is general information from the vendors' own pages. It is not legal advice, and a short answer from the vendor's support team beats any reading of the terms, including this one.

Where ZeroRaised fits#

Hosting is one of the first bills a bootstrapped product meets, which is why ZeroRaised keeps the free tiers dataset. It lists the free plans of 14 hosting, serverless and database platforms, with every figure and terms statement linked to the vendor's own page and a visible check date. You can read the full free tiers dataset or download it as a CSV from the same page, and the ZeroRaised data hub lists it alongside the other ZeroRaised datasets. If a vendor's page has changed since the check date, the vendor's page wins.

If you are building with AI tools and deploying to a free plan first, how to launch a vibe coded app covers the move from prototype to something people pay for.

ZeroRaised is a free launch site for bootstrapped makers whose products have no institutional VC or accelerator equity. When your product is on a plan that suits paying customers, you can submit it for review. The maker perks page lists separate offers for eligible makers, some of which cut running costs.

So, free hosting for commercial use in one line: Vercel Hobby says no, Turso's terms say non-commercial without naming the free plan, and the other free plans in the dataset do not publish a rule, so read the terms or ask the vendor before you charge.